Quick Links - Poets.org

follow poets.org

Search form

The Academy of American Poets is the largest membership-based nonprofit organization fostering an appreciation for contemporary poetry and supporting American poets. For over three generations, the Academy has connected millions of people to great poetry through programs such as National Poetry Month, the largest literary celebration in the world; Poets.org, the Academy’s popular website; American Poets, a biannual literary journal; and an annual series of poetry readings and special events. Since its founding, the Academy has awarded more money to poets than any other organization.

occasions

Born and raised in California, Eleni Sikelianos, the great-grandaughter of the Nobel-nominated Greek poet Angelos Sikelianos, received an MFA in Writing & Poetics from the Naropa Institute.

She is the author of The Loving Detail of the Living & the Dead (Coffee House Press, 2013), Body Clock (Coffee House Press, 2008), The Book of Jon (City Lights Publishers, 2004), The California Poem (Coffee House Press, 2004), The Monster Lives of Boys & Girls (Green Integer, 2003), Earliest Worlds (Coffee House Press, 2001), The Book of Tendons (Post-Apollo Press, 1997), and To Speak While Dreaming (Selva Editions, 1993).

She has received numerous honors and awards for her poetry, nonfiction, and translations, including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, residencies at Princeton University as a Seeger Fellow, at La Maison des écrivains étrangers in Britanny, and at Yaddo, a New York Foundation for the Arts Award in Nonfiction Literature, the James D. Phelan Award, two Gertrude Stein Awards for Innovative American Writing, and the New York Council for the Arts Translation Award.

Her work has been translated into a dozen languages, and she has participated in a number of international poetry festivals, including the Centre National du Livre's Belles Etrangères reading tour of France, the Days of Poetry and Wine in Slovenia, the Barcelona Poetry Festival, and Metropole Bleu in Montreal.

For many years, Sikelianos taught poetry for Teachers & Writers Collaborative in New York, and California Poets in the Schools, working in public schools and with at-risk youth, as well as in homeless shelters and prisons. She has taught in the creative writing program at the University of Denver and the Naropa Summer Writing Program. She currently teaches poetry in the literary arts department at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.

Survey: Phototropes

The snow falls, picks itself up, dusts itself offa sparrow flying like a leaf back up to its treeThe future does a backbend toward you, it'swhat you can almost see, scrimmedin the clouds which crowd the sky, elbowing, laughing

After that I see space and its influence in a bucket of spinning waterand two calcium atoms shoot forth, twinned photons traveling

back to back, arms unlaced, perfectswimmers in the lit dusk

Where are they going?

First, to Holland, thento calcium-kiss her bones

And in Holland the streets are made of water, the dolls & dogs gather round lit picnic tables like happy rags

The body is in the root cellar

When snow falls our dead gather close to our bonesbecause the cold's ghost has come back to haunt the cold & the body,too, is a happy rag

Tree, take a photograph of her thought, you can do itwith photosynthesis: silhouettes of seals appear, a swarmed planet and its satellites, a celestial atlas that breaks when tapped (it's glass)Some giraffes, some elephants, a lion scatterin the clearing; in the clearing

the leaves of the world turn toward the light as do the letters of the wordthe words are beautiful not for their accuracy but for their dream:words-are-arrows that loop between no-man's-land and the wetlands, softflints flying toward their target

—words bird the zone—

when home was adopted as motherarea was given here[a future of] all surface, no border

Eleni Sikelianos

by this poet

—after Alejandra Pizarnik
A yellow scraping across my skin when
I write the word “sky”
Not sky but scything :
to let day be scraped out
by night
I scratched down the word “flower” & felt
the parts draw away from the tongue.
Not gnomon, grown*man, but ghost

A man called Dad walks by
then another one does. Dad, you say
and he turns, forever turning, forever
being called. Dad, he turns, and looks
at you, bewildered, his face a moving
wreck of skin, a gravity-bound question
mark, a fruit ripped in two, an animal
that can't escape the field.

Saying: One night in a cloud chamber
I discovered a thing: that a thing (I used to have a crown
of light) a thing could be more
than True, and more again
than False, a thing
could carry its name
with a ticket of lights
called Possible: In a cloud chamber, particles are betrayed
by movement and water vapors